Around 40 people turned out to the Cortes Island Museum on November 10 for the launch of a series of community speakers. The host, Brian Scott traced the idea for ‘Finding Home: The Cortes Island Experience’  to a conversation he had with Sherman Barker. 

“Sherman and I have known each other for a few years, it’s long other story, but he was up on Easter Bluff one day when Jane and I went up for a hike.  We’re chatting, and he started telling us his arrival story. It actually goes even further back to when he came as a kid.  He said, there’s lots of stories on the island here and if we don’t somehow capture them, we’re going to lose them.” 

“I thought it would be an interesting thing for the museum to do because the museum has artifacts that it’s saving and preserving and sharing with the public. Stories are artifacts as well. How do we capture those? Then it occurred to me, well, why don’t we do a speaker series? I approached Sherman and said, ‘Hey, what do you think? You want to be the first?’ And he’s like, ‘yep, It’s awesome.’”  

“So essentially it’s: how did you discover the island? What made you decide this is going to be my home? And what keeps you here?” 

Sherman described his interest in the project:

“In my mind, I pictured a book with a leather cover, front and back, maybe made from one of the goats you tanned. It has parchment pages, like you may have discovered it in a hobbit library. It could be in our library. When people come here in the summer, or people who have been here a long time, they can write down why they came to Cortes and the things that happened when they came here. Everybody’s got funny stories, sad stories, like what was your first ferry ride like? What was the reason you came to Cortes? It could be really cool book just to keep the past, present, and future all intertwined.”

“The first time that I  came here I just finished grade 6 in a little town up in the north Shuswap called Celista, which I think is pretty much burnt to the ground right now.” 

“My dad was a teacher  and he had an elementary school that he was transforming into an outdoor educational school without the school board knowing about it.  I’m going back into the seventies, and public school.  He wanted to come to Strathcona Lodge, to take an edible plant and wilderness survival course so he could go back and teach his kids at the school.”

“We packed up our old truck in the Shuswap and to the coast we came. We camped in the truck at Stanley Park. We ended up on Cortes because he was friends with the writer here, Gilean Douglas, and he wanted me to meet Gilean Douglas. We came to Cortes from Quadra. We camped at Rebecca Spit, because you could camp at the Spit at that time. I caught my first salmon there.” 

“We came across, and camped at the Gorge. And at that time, I think the Gorge would have been in the hands of  Tammy Allwork’s parents. It was just a big field. No hot tub, you could go outside, dig a hole, and have a fire. It’s summer. I remember picking up some apples, they had started but were not fully ripe, and walking out to an apple tree.  A black tailed deer looked at me and I looked at the deer and it walked up and ate the apple out of my hand. That’s a pretty impressionable thing at 12 because where I grew up, white tailed deer do not walk up to you and eat apples out of your hands for a good reason, right?  That was my first sort of emphatic whoa!”

“When you had first approached me Brian, I’d totally forgotten about that.” 

“I flipped forward in time to whenwas living on Mayne Island and looking for land. Like a lot of young people, even then, I didn’t want to live there. it’s way too expensive. I kept  looking and looking.”   

“Some people here would probably remember Roland Kuitenbrouwer, from the Gorge, and his stepson Soren.We were tree planting and we had a barge. We’d go from here to the Alaskan Panhandle doing contracts.” 

“We had a week off. My routine was to go down to real estate offices and say, ‘this is what I’m looking for. I want rural land. I don’t want to live in a place where there’s building inspectors. I’m looking for a creek that runs through the place.’ That’s a pretty tall order these days.  I went into the real estate office in Campbell River.  They gave me the sheet and there were Raven Lumber lots out on Cortes Island. The real estate agent’s name was Janice Piche. I said, ‘Can you take me for a tour of the Raven Lumber Lots?” 

“Already in my mind, Raven Lumber? And I’m like, ‘Oh God?’ because if you’re a tree planter, you see right through the greenwash because you’re in it. We walked in, and I’m like, ‘ oh, my God, there’s still trees. There’s old growth trees. There’s a creek.’ And I’m going, ‘they didn’t cut this down.’ She said, ‘yeah, you were looking for running water. This is a class one salmon stream.’ Once in a while you still find Coho in Hanson Creek. There’s a lot of blow down in there because the northwest winds are getting stronger and there’s a lot of root rots in the big Fir.”

“Sometimes you just put out a wish, the universe answers you and you’re walking through that wish and you don’t quite believe it because it’s too good.” 

“Back then land was affordable. When places get gentrified and the land prices go up, the young people that don’t come from money are pretty much toast. Here’s a metaphor:  if the world was flat and it was a giant piece of pizza,  I feel like my generation took three pieces.  If we don’t learn to give back, they don’t get to share the dreams that you got to manifest.” 

“The entrance of my place is the old logging road that went through. There was a hundred and twenty acres on one side of Hanson Creek.  There were lots 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5 and then on the other side of Squirrel Cove Road was 4, 3, 2, 1.” 

“So I’m really loving the place that she’s showing me because it’s got everything and for me  to actually be able to sit in a real forest is pretty healing. We’ve walked through lots 9, 8, 7, 6 and we’re into the wetlands.  I’m pretty excited, so I’m blathering away. Janice is walking with me and she’s excited because she knows this guy’s going to buy this land. Does anybody remember when you could buy 10 acres for $80,000?” 

“We’re right at the Beaver Pond and this guy just steps out. He’s in full camo gear.  He’s got a 30-30 and he’s just standing there. ‘Oh, my God. Like, is this what’s coming to Cortes?’ He just steps out with his gun and he’s got a kind of a smile on his face.” 

“Janice says, ‘Oh, hi.’ So already I know that they know each other, which is a big relief. He’s just looking at me and he’s playing with me a bit.  He’s not really saying any words because you can wait for the person to engage and make a complete idiot out of themselves when they’re already acting like an idiot.” 

“He said, ‘Oh, I really like to hunt back here. There’s water, there’s old growth forest. When I first moved there, there was a cougar den that’s literally a hundred yards from my house.’  He’s just looking at me and he goes, ‘ this place is going to change. I’m just letting you know.’  He looked at me and we kind of did this thing, and he went, ‘I think you should go to Haida Gwaii.'”

“I’m looking at Jan and she’s like, ‘I don’t have any listings in Haida Gwaii.'” 

“This guy was a bush guy. He literally steps backward and he just disappeared.  I’m looking at Janice.  She’s looking at me and she goes, ‘that’s Rambo the Preacher.'”  

“That’s the only time I ever met him. I think that he did move to Haida Gwaii. I’d love to know the story of Rambo the Preacher. I wish the book was already here so he could have written what he thought.” 

“That was my first experience of finding my home, but we came there.”  

“My cousin, who worked in a logging camp, gifted me this big 32 foot bluebird bus (photo at top of page) that he used to bring into logging camps. We set it up out there and then spend two winters with a baby on a bus.”

“One of the reasons I wanted to move here is I wanted to be, like, far, far, far away from bureaucracy and the ‘wisdom’ of building inspectors.  When I started building my house, I had this idea of the Straw Bale House and all I had was a book. You would never get away with this in Campbell River. There was a woman that was living on the island named Sinnay. She was from Arizona and lived at Stefano Savioli’s place, where my neighbour Abigail lives now. Sinnay was the only person I’d met that had ever built a straw bale structure.” 

“I said to her, ‘what brought you to Cortes?'”

“She said, ‘well, I hadn’t a clue where Cortes was. I was in Seattle and walking through the Pike Street Market.  It was a nice day, and there was a guy  playing my favourite Bob Dylan song. I dropped him a $10 bill.  He looked at her, and he said, ‘You should go to Cortes.’ I’m not making this up, it was totally random. She didn’t even know where Cortes was. She was a teacher of autistic kids, had a good job in Seattle, but decided to go where this guy, who was probably playing ‘the Times Are Changing’ or whatever, suggested. She ended up in Stefano’s little cabin that was on the property. Sinnay was here for three or four years. I said I wanted to build a straw house and she helped me do it.” 

“Back in the day, there was a woman that used to come here, Elke Cole, part of the Mud Girls. They built some stuff at Linnaea Farm and they did that really funky face and everything on Donna and Richard’s big house. So she gave me a drawing and that’s what I had, not really blueprints. Some of you remember when Robbie Driediger lived here with his backhoe. He just didn’t make holes in your land and give you bills. He knew how to move land around. He did a rubble trench foundation like they do on castles in Europe, and castles have been around longer than cement. There was a great big huge rock  and he said, ‘Sherman,  you can either move this rock or you can have a drop down living room.’ That’s the beauty when you don’t have to come in with the pre-approved blueprint.  You can go with the flow.  That was way easier than blasting out a rock and a lot more affordable.”

Brian Scott: “You mentioned using tires.”

Sherman Barker:  “This guy had said if you want a really solid, flexible foundation and you don’t want to drop two thirds of your building on a cement thing that’s damp and cold, you build a rubble trench foundation.Use chiprock, which I got from Robbie and Ann. He dug it all out, put it in. There was drain at the bottom. On top of it, he said, put crushed chiprock into the tires, put them on top. Then I built the floor and brought the foundation to the floor.” 

Cortes Currents: There was a slideshow playing while he talked and Sherman pointed to one of the images.

“That’s Ian Young digging a hole for the trampoline.  When I was tree planting, I used to travel with a trampoline for my daughter (and a babysitter).” 

“When I  first arrived, I was working with my brother milling wood for my house because he had a bandsaw mill set up. I had this thing for 25 years and then I sold it to buy insulation to finish my house. I still regret that.” 

Cortes Currents: Sherman pointed to a picture of an old Chevy panel van that he was driving when he met Bert Hansen, one of the local ferry captains.

Sherman Barker: “When I first met Bert Hansen, the van was loaded with 2x8s. I had the doors tied shut, not very well. I was coming off the ferry.  It’s at a really low tide. I was behind a guy that had three bicycles and his kids were screaming because the bicycles were getting bent sideways as they went off. Well, my rope broke and all the 2x8s slid out. I’m the third person off. It’s summer. It’s busy.  They didn’t go right on to the ferry. They’re wedged  between the truck and in the crevice.  Bert comes down and he goes, ‘Oh my God, the f…ing hippies are here!'”

“So, what’s your best ferry story? I can remember a summer when I was coming back from the interior. There were a lot of walk-ons, and everybody was just marvelling, as we all do when we first come here on the ferry. I’ve never seen a humpback come so close into a bay, but a humpback came up,  breached, and soaked everyone on the ferry!” 

Cortes Currents: Sherman remembered a time when the weather was rough, but Bert ignored orders so that he could get everyone back to Cortes.

“Twenty-three years ago I remember being with my daughter at the Heriot Bay Inn on Christmas Eve. Heriot Bay didn’t have an electric fire then, it had a real fireplace. It was the last ferry to Cortes and people were just like, ‘You could have the couch. I’ll be on the floor.’  My daughter is looking at me and she’s like,’ Santa Claus is coming down our chimney, not this chimney.’  I’m serious, you tell these stories to kids, they’re going to tell it back to you.  I’m like, ‘oh my God, we could be sleeping on the floor here.’ . Bert  Hansen walked into the Heriot Bay Inn and said, ‘we’re going, I don’t care what they say,’ and we went.'” 

“From winter days, it’s like, ‘oh, God, let’s just forget about the house and go to Mexico.’ I went with my wife  just before our daughter was born.  Linnaea School was a big factor in drawing a lot of people here. Awesome teachers like Dana.” 

“Some people from Montana rented the house on the beach beside Hollyhock. It wasn’t fancy then. They came up when I was building the house and they gifted me this wood fired hot tub. They originally came with that tub on a trailer, they had a lid on it. They traveled, with their three daughters, in a Volvo and kept everything in there. They had 200 feet of poly in the bottom so they could have gravity feed if they camped at a creek. They lived here for a year and a half so their daughters could go to Linnaea.  Craig was just infatuated with our driftwood, because he lived in Montana. So when they left they took a load of driftwood and left me their hot tub.” 

“When I first came here, if I wasn’t tree planting, I was swinging a hammer on the side. Hubert Havelaar came to see me building my house and started laughing  when I told him I was going to have a deck- living room with skylights on it.”

“A group of the carpenters came to look, and said, “You’re the newbie on the block. Do you even know what you’re doing, are you sure if the deer don’t get really hungry this winter, they’re not going to eat your walls?’ They didn’t and this house is 35 years old.”

“When Raven logged this land, they left huge pieces of Douglas fir on the ground. A guy came in with his bandsaw and we milled it up.”

“At that time, I was pumping water from the creek to a cistern on the hill. People told me that my family would get beaver fever from blah, blah, blah. Nobody got sick. I drank that creek water for years.”

“I was working for a welder part time and asked, ‘where do we drill for a well?'”

“He said, no problem, I’ll bring Gunnar out.” 

“Anybody here have a well that Gunnar Hansen witched?” 

Someone in the audience replied, “yes.”

“This guy would be drilling on some expensive places and they’d bring in an expert who would state thousands of dollars were needed for a study. He’d be like, ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’ and then he’d just phone Gunnar. Gunnar would come out and tell him to drill here and there would always be water.”

“Gunnar came out to my place, walked to the front gate of my house and went  ‘If you go down here 250 feet, you’re going to hit an underground stream at about 12 gallons a minute. You could have a wheat field.'” 

“Tom Fyfe was moving his rig to Twin Islands and he needed a place to park it.  He left me his drilling rig there. I don’t know what a well costs to drill these days, but if somebody leaves you a drilling rig and you get to drill your own well, it’s pretty nice.”

“There’s a lot of people here that remember before we had a recycling centre-free store. Before I came to Cortes, we were living on Mayne Island, and my wife at the time knew Dova Wilshire (from the Recycling Centre) very well, because they did theatre together on Mayne Island.”

“When I finished the house, I was looking at this bus my cousin gifted me and it was still a good bus. It was really well outfitted on the inside. My neighbour at the time was in charge of the highways department. He was living on a bus down near where Ben Fulton is.

“I said, “I’m finished building my house and I don’t want to be stuck with a bus that I can’t get out of here. If a tree falls on it, you just got a big hunk of metal you can’t get rid of. He came and looked at it and loved it.” 

“I said, ‘this is the deal, the bus is yours. You have just got to get it out of here. This was going to be something you can appreciate and you could only get away with in Cortes. At this point, the rear wheels, as we all know with big vehicles left on land, that the brake drums rust together and you’re not moving it anywhere except on the front tires. Hopefully those brake drums aren’t rusted. So the front worked, the back didn’t. He came in with the highway backhoe and lifted up the back of the bus. It was so heavy he had to go back and get some weights, which you can do with a backhoe to rectify the weight. He lifted up the bus, a friend of his sat at the steering wheel, and they came down my driveway. I live in the middle of the Gorge Hill. Thank God there wasn’t a double tandem gravel truck coming down the hill at a hundred miles an hour.”

“At that time they just leased the land to start the Cortes Recycling Centre. They took the bus all the way to where the free store was and parked it.  I think Bill Friedel was just starting construction of the buildings.  I came there one day and the old bus was the sorting station. Henry Verschuur ended up with the motor because it was a (I forget whatever) 450, it’s the motor that Henry wanted.” 

“For a long time, the bus was used for sorting stuff, but also a bit of a free store. It got repurposed. Dova and a lot of people put a lot of work into creating this place where we feel great about letting go of our junk.” 

“So I’ve been sharing my land and I’m going to invite Isabel LaPlante to come up and describe her first experience coming to Cortes and how she got here.”

Isabelle LaPlante: “As most of you know, I’m the nurse here. I’ve been on Cortes Island for more than 10 years and I’ve had a foot care business here for a long time.” 

“So it’s like the original story of everything is pretty convoluted, but I was living out in Wakefield, Quebec, and my friend was like ‘ Hey, I want to move to BC and want to drive there. I want to leave in a couple of weeks. You want to come?'” 

“When you have an invitation like this and then your whole being says yes, and you’re like, I should check if there’s jobs there or whatever, but as a nurse, it’s pretty easy. So we went. It was -40°C in Ottawa and we went through big blizzards in Michigan. It was a long journey and then when I finally got here, my friend had a cousin at Forbidden Plateau Road. I had a sinking feeling of like, ‘okay, now I’m here, I don’t know where I’m going to live or what I’m going to do.’ I had friends on Quadra. So I just settled there in a small cabin for a week, and then I opened up the Tideline and Barb Vosper had just released her foot care business. I called her up and she’s like, ‘yeah, they do the foot care course every couple of years.’ So, I took the foot care course and I’ve been coming ever since. I lived on Quadra, and worked in the Intensive Care Unit in Campbell River for many years.”

“I’ve been good friends with Fawn for a long time and she’s like, ‘ why haven’t you moved here yet? You belong here.'”  

I was like, “It’s not the right time.”

“Linda retired and then I was already in the know cause it’s doing foot care. So I took the job and then I made a little sign with a little stick man that said, ‘Hey, looking for a place to call home.’ I had a few people respond, that was in February or the end of January, 2020.  I checked out three places and they all looked pretty good, but coming to Sherman’s was just straight up what you see was what you get, with all its funkiness or whatever. I could just trust the connection. There’s no square corners in the house. It’s all fluid and it just felt really feminine being in there. So we were housemates for three years.” 

“Billy and Ashley were there too, on the land. I remember when I was moving and we’re all like topless and gardening together, really sweet memories working and living together.” 

“There’s like rough edges sometimes. I needed to have my own space. There was a beautiful home in the Cowichan Valley, on a fifth wheel frame. Some friends were selling it. I’m not a tiny house person really, I need more space, so my parents came and we built the addition here on the side. It’s in the sunniest spot of the property, by the greenhouse and overlooking the gardens. It’s been really lovely.”

Sherman Barker: “Could I add something Isabel? Everybody that’s built has been sharing the wood that was left on the land.”

Isabelle LaPlante: “Yeah, a lot of the foundation from the addition came from a beautiful fir on the land.  It’s nice to have that, but a lot of wood came from Quadra Builders. It’s my home and I love it. I’m grateful to share it with good people, and learn about what it means to live together in collaboration and to tune in to who you are. I think we all have our different aspirations for being there, and then just staying true to that.” 

After the meeting Brain informed Cortes Currents that he hopes to hold ‘Finding Home: The Cortes Island Experience speaker sessions at the museum every second Sunday of the month, starting on January 2, 2025. 

This is a heavily edited +20 minute abridged version of 50 minutes of audio from the meeting. The written version went through further editing. All undesignated photos courtesy Sherman Barker